Australian poet and potter Kylie Johnson fashions bowls and trays out of clay and then imprints them with sentiments so achingly beautiful that mere words on paper could never compare. She finds a way to capture, so simply, all that is lovely and true. This tray (above) that she did for Anthropologie is especially affecting.

I’ve been looking at this illustration for about an hour now. On one simple piece of paper, you can discover the six degrees of separation between Plato and Zadie Smith, J.J. Abrams and Isaac Newton,
and Voltaire and Moby.

It was created for the Debt issue of Longshot Magazine by Michelle Legro of Lapham’s Quarterly, Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, and illustrator Wendy MacNaughton. The illustration is meant to chart the “artistic, scientific, and philosophical debts through time.”

It’s a human algorithm that weaves together centuries of creative thought. Sort of mind-blowing, really. I only wish I had paid this close attention in history class! You can hear Legro, Popova and MacNaughton interviewed about the creation of the chart on Longshot Radio.

I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for visiting my blog and leaving such lovely comments! It means so much to me! I LOVE the linkbacks to your blogs in the new comment form. I spent most of the day yesterday reading all your posts. I know there are millions of sites out there to read, but I want you to know that I’m very thankful you’re here.

I’m still working on my new blogroll. Please let me know if you want to be included!

Some of my favorite cookbooks are exactly like this: packed with personal tidbits and recipes that date back generations. Frances’s book is collage poem to her family, but dedicated to her readers.

She writes: “I dedicate this book to all those countless home cooks whom continually put a meal on the table with flair, grace & often with an inventiveness that is called for when trying to figure out what to make for dinner.”

I guess that would be me. (Minus the grace & flair part.) I never know what to cook.

Happy Friday everyone…
Seems I’ve been writing a lot about Paris this week. I keep getting emails from Air France saying they’re having a grand summer sale with one-way fares around $250. And I really want to go. But, alas, I can’t for now…

So here’s to a weekend of vicarious living. I just started reading the Paris Wife by Paula McLain on my Kindle Cloud. It’s a historical fiction about the time Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley spent in the City of Light. It’s good so far, the perfect end-of-summer read.

I also downloaded the latest copy of Marie Claire Idees on Zinio in a quest for a new craft project. Their patterns are so cute. The only drawback is I can’t read French. (Can I Google translate an entire magazine?)

In 1951 on Paris’s Rue de la Bûcherie, American George Whitman opened an English-language bookstore called Le Mistral. The shop quickly became the center of literary culture in Bohemian Left Bank Paris, filling the void created when Sylvia Beach’s beloved Shakespeare and Company was shut down during World War II.

Upon Beach’s death in 1962, Le Mistral’s name was changed to Shakespeare and Company, and now the histories of the two stores have blended into one.

Paris photographer and blogger Candice Lesage spent the day there recently, capturing the spirit of the old bookstore:

“I was walking in Paris (more especially near St-Michel) with Cosima, I couldn’t help but take pictures of this marvellous bookshop,” Candice recently wrote on her blog. “I think this is one of my favorite spots in Paris, it’s full of books – and most of the time, there’s too many people as well.”

The original Shakespeare and Company has a wonderful history. As with all great beginnings, it involved love:

American-born Sylvia Beach came to Paris during World War I to study the French literature she adored. There, she also met the woman who would be her great love, Adrienne Monnier, and found the occupation that would become her passion–bookselling and publishing. Monnier was one of the first women in France to own a book store and lending library, Maison des Amis des Livres, which specialized in that country’s modern literature and was gathering place for Paris’ literary avant garde. Beach took a $3,000 gift from her mother and opened an English language counterpart across the street at 12 rue de l’Odeon.

She called it Shakespeare and Company, and even though the original store has long been shuttered, it remains perhaps the world’s most famous book store. During the great creative ferment between the wars, Shakespeare and Company became a refuge and meeting place for the English-speaking writers drawn to Paris–Hemingway immortalized it in “A Moveable Feast”; James Joyce, T.S. Elliot, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein were regulars and members of the lending library.

Shakespeare and Company was where they came for books, to pick up their mail, to meet and listen to one another and for Beach’s famously sympathetic ear. (All writers, she once said, like best to talk about their troubles.) If for no other reason, Beach and her book store deserve to be remembered for a single courageous act: In 1922, she published a book no regular publisher was brave enough to touch–Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, “Ulysses”, one of the greatest of all 20th century novels.

Shakespeare and Company fared badly during the Great Depression and, in the late 1930’s, was on verge of going under, when the great French writer Andre Gide organized a series of dazzling readings and lectures there and sold all the 200 available seats for each event by subscription, all proceeds going to Beach.
Many of the world’s greatest contemporary writers took part and the series remains a legend on the Parisian literary scene.

Shakespeare and Company closed when the Germans interned Beach during World War II. Even though Sylvia Beach never reopened her store, she remained in her beloved Paris until her death. She was happy, honored and well-loved, one of the brave and open minds that illuminated the City of Lights.

One of my friends once joked that even if she became temporarily homeless she’d need a PO box just to get her monthly copy of The World of Interiors. It’s easy to understand why. So few magazines capture the British Eclectic sensibility as marvelously as this glossy tome.

An article in the September issue on designer Frédéric de Luca’s Paris apartment is a perfect example. Writer Marie-France Boyer, detailing every nook of the apartment, observed: “(Frédéric’s) charming and welcoming three-roomed flat is full to bursting with a hotchpotch of furniture, paintings, fabrics and colourful knickknacks that give it the feel of a box of bonbons or a treasure chest.”

Have a look:

Frédéric’s esthetic muses: Una Troubridge, the Marchesa Luisa Casati, Nancy Cunard, Colette, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolfe. Boyer notes: “The last two have pride of place in a photo on his bookshelves. In the decorative arts too, his two main references date from this period: the Wiener Werkstätte and
the Bloomsbury Movement.”

(Sigh. Swoon.)

While I’m writing this I realize that I have to remember to tell my friend Susan the she doesn’t need a PO box to get her World of Interiors. Copies are now available online for subscription and download on Zinio.com.See the September issue here!

Thank you for making the move this week with me from Blogger to WordPress! I hope that you’re liking the new format and slideshow. Thank you to Paris photographer Candice Lesage for permission to use her gorgeous Jane Eyre photos.

The blog is still missing some of my old post comments. Not all of them made it over. Alas. I’ll also be uploading missing thumbnails for the rest of the year. It’s a work in progress!

To love good writing and the novel is to love Jane Austen. Even when harshly sweeping, her judgments are so elegantly put that they convince absolutely and seem to absolve those who share them of any hint of condescension. For example: “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

Those of us who share that sentiment—and in this holiday reading month of August, who doesn’t?—still are excited by the recent auction at Sotheby’s in London of the last privately owned fragment of an Austen novel in the author’s own handwriting. It’s doubly delightful that the buyer was Oxford’s Bodleian Library, which paid $1.6 million for the 68 hand-cut pages that Austen herself bound into 11 small booklets, so the manuscript will remain in England, where it belongs. It will go on public display as early as this fall.

Another 12 pages of the abandoned novel, titled “The Watsons”, are in New York’s Pierpont Morgan Library. They were sold during World War I to raise money for the Red Cross. Austen worked on “The Watsons” in 1804 after completing early drafts of “Sense and Sensibility”, “Pride and Prejudice” and Northanger Abbey.” (Which is your favorite?)

“The Watsons’” narrator is a young woman who has returned home to her impoverished clergyman father after being raised by a wealthy aunt. The father dies, leaving the young woman and her sisters in very harsh straits—much as Austen’s own father would do the next year.

None of the author’s handwritten drafts of her finished novels survive, though we do have a handful of discarded chapters from “Persuasion” and the unpublished “Lady Susan”. What’s exciting about this manuscript is that it gives us the fullest picture of Austen the writer at work, editing words and phrases, inserting sentences, all in a tiny, wonderfully precise handwriting. All that’s missing is that magic that only a completed Jane Austen novel can bestow.